A few suggestions that came to my head when looking at the results. On some authors, most of related items are items made by the same author. Sometimes the buyer indeed wants similar items of the same authors, but sometimes they want to see related items by other authors. It might be better if there were two separate lists of similar items. One list of similar items by the same author (which would replace the old list of “more items by…”) and another with similar items but only by other authors.

The algorithm itself might be a bit more sophisticated as well. I don’t know what algo is used right now, but adding the cross-selling and cross-viewing data would help a lot, because just analyzing the tags and keywords cannot replace the real user experience. I’ve coded such kind of lists many times, and using user behavior data in connection with keywords and category can yield great results.

We’ll be the ability to facet on all sorts of criteria down the track, and I’ll be sure to add the ability to show either the same author, other authors or both.

The current algorithm merely looks at tags, titles and item description, but we’ll be looking at adding more sophisticated algorithms down the track

guitarsstate said
Nice idea in general, but still I find it a bit confusing. Maybe because I’m not used to it. At first I was in shock to see some other guy’s work on my item’s page(I’m sure that a lot of authors felt like that). Anyway, it’s great that the guys at Envato are trying out new ways of promotion. Keep up the awesome work
P.S. I hope that the buyers will not get lost in that pile of so many “similar” items

We did consider that some authors will be angry about other authors’ items on their item page, but the reverse is true, so it increases exposure for all authors, which is a good thing

This is still in early beta and we’ll be tweaking the feature, and capping the number of similar items is high up on the list!

SchwartzSound said
Thinking about it more, perhaps it would be nice to update the “More from author” list so that it doesn’t simply show the newest items, but shows the similar items from the author, and then the “Other similar items” would omit the owner entirely and only show other related author tracks.

SchwartzSound said
Thinking about it more, perhaps it would be nice to update the “More from author” list so that it doesn’t simply show the newest items, but shows the similar items from the author, and then the “Other similar items” would omit the owner entirely and only show other related author tracks.

AlumoAudio said
Also, when I visit one of these similar items, I’ve noticed my own tracks are not reciprocated on their item.

Hmm, that shouldn’t be happening, we’ll look into that.

vibecode said
It would be best if this feature is an optional. If an author does not want to show other people’s files on his page, he could turn off this feature (his files also not visible on other authors page in this case)

So would this be a per item or global per author per marketplace basis? Or an author default, then opt-in/out per item?

garethcoker said
First thing I noticed is that the ‘similar items’ doesn’t change no matter how many times you refresh. These similar items absolutely shouldn’t be static.

I have to agree with others, I think it should be optional. This kind of thing works very well on Amazon but probably not as well here.

Also, I can’t see how you’re going to be able to make this system fair to all authors. I’d be pleasantly surprised if your system allows you to shuffle items around enough that enough music from different authors gets exposed.

BCrutchfield said
I think that this system will be readily abusable if it doesn’t actually ‘listen’ to the tracks and just goes off of description/tags like it seems to be doing.

If this is true, people can just tag all of their corporate/cinematic/etc items the exact same way and likely end up with all of them being in their ‘similar items’ list. You can see this phenomenon already happening on portfolios of authors who have dozens of files per category/sub-category.

Or like vibecode pointed out, people can aim their description/tags/titles at getting placed into a popular files related items list and try to game the system that way.

I think the best way to help out the buyers would be to finish up that new search engine thats been shown in the forums. I remember seeing several buyers in the forums express frustration with the current version of it, and I think that a new, more comprehensive search would help out far more than a similar items list would.

Implementing a system that actually can actually listen to the track and determine the style is extremely difficult, and that’s an understatement. Pandora.com’s Music Genome Project was a mostly manual process that took 30 experts in music theory five years to complete. We don’t have that kind of time or resources to do anything like that.

Attempting to game the system by tagging items the same as popular items is actually detrimental to you and the community. The goal of tags is to allow buyers to find the item that they want. If a buyer is looking for a particular style but they keep having to sift through tracks that don’t sound anywhere close to what they want, they’ll probably not buy anything leave. They might not even come back.

If you’ve done a Google search and kept stumbling across useless results because some websites just duplicate other people’s content, have countless misleading meta tags and fill the page with ads, that is a result of people trying to game the system. They’re disappearing fast because Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm and heavily penalising websites that are doing this, and we will be doing the same for authors trying to game the system.

Of course, a new search engine may help, but a search engine is only as good as the quality of metadata of the content.

MadOzMedia said
May not help the new upcoming Author’s. Customer lands on my page and want’s to buy my file and if he’s given a choice of similar item’s might lead him away and create confusion in his decision and I might loose a sale.
If I’m featured on other author’s page and there are top selling author’s, Chances are that I would loose to the top author’s as the client’s decision might be based on the sales and the popularity of the author.

The reverse can also be true. A buyer may want to avoid buying a track that has many sales because they don’t want something that everyone else has already bought and is using elsewhere. Buyers are likely to to purchase the track they like more, rather than purely based on sales/popularity, otherwise new authors wouldn’t have any sales at all

chendo said
Hmmm, I can toy with shuffling similar items around, but it can annoy some users when items magically shuffle around.

Hey chendo, thanks for all your responses.

Just wanted to clarify this point above. What I actually meant that no matter how many times I refresh, it’s always the same items that appear, and I think that the related items that appear should be different each time I press refresh, or should change on a weekly basis. Like, right now there’s 7 songs, and that’s it. There should at least be a rotation of more than 7 songs, as this will help expand the catalog to buyers.

If you could implement something that’s like the ‘Weekly Features’ on the homepage, where there is are left and right arrows for users to scroll through, I think that would improve the situation, but – and I’m not a coder – that might be a coding nightmare – though Amazon and Newegg do it, so it’s clearly possible.

To your credit though, having clicked through my portfolio, the similar items are actually quite ‘similar’ to my item, for which you should be applauded. My overall point, is that I think there should be more variety, and not the same 7 songs the whole time. I know the user can just click ‘More Items’ and ‘More Similar Items’, but copying the idea of the ‘Weekly Features’ code onto the item pages seems more elegant to me.